Computing & Online Safety

Staff at St. Clare’s recognise the huge importance of computing for the pupils in our school and also the benefits of using computing as a tool to support teaching, learning and engaging our children across the curriculum. We believe computing is a crucial part of children’s learning, as technology is now essential to navigating our present world and innovating for the future.

Our Aims:

• To enable children to become autonomous, independent users of computing technologies, gaining confidence and enjoyment by providing tasks which are interesting and give scope for individual responsibility
• To develop a whole school approach to computing ensuring continuity and progression in all strands of the Computing National Curriculum
• To use computing technologies as a tool to support teaching, learning and management across the curriculum
• To enable all children to develop their computing capabilities by ensuring enough access by pupils to become more proficient in the basic computing skills
• To enable all children to evaluate the benefits of computing and its impact on society through discussion about the benefits and limitations of computing and by creating opportunities to compare classroom use of computing with that in the wider world
• To meet the requirement of the National Curriculum enabling all children to reach the highest possible standards of achievements by planning activities which allow different levels of achievement or incorporate possibilities for extension work

At St Clare’s we use the PurpleMash scheme of work, as well as Teach Computing, Scratch and STEM units, to provide a robust and rigorously sequenced curriculum that breaks learning into small, sequential steps that become progressively more complex and challenging over time. Our computing curriculum ensures that pupils meet the end of Key Stage attainment targets outlined in the National Curriculum. Across a rich range of units, children master content related to computer science, information technology and digital literacy. Together these strands come together to teach children how computers and computer systems work, how to design, build and analyse programs, and how to find and manage digital information securely in order to equip our children with the skills for life in the modern world.